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Bringing resilience down to earth: Panel discussion
Louise Jackson, Kamal Bawa, Peter de Ruiter, Luis Garcia-Barrios, Patrick Lavelle
Submission 60 : Sustainable weighting of ecology-economics tradeoff (SWEET):
Agrobiodiversity, sustainability and sustainagility across land use intensification gradients
in a global comparative study
A panel discussion will explore research approaches to improve our capacity to respond to
unforeseen change in agricultural landscapes. Preparation for uncertainty requires current
investment now for quick and flexible adaptation strategies later on. Yet, keeping multiple
options open will be inefficient and suboptimal, especially for hundreds of millions that
face poverty and lack food security. This may be especially true for biodiversity
conservation despite its enormous future option value for sustainable agricultural
landscapes. For this reason, three themes will be addressed in particular. 1) What are the
current trajectories and prognoses for long-term ecological and economic sustainability
under different agricultural frameworks? Examples will be from an agroforest landscape in
the Eastern Amazon, a mountain biosphere reserve in Mexico, a forest-wildlife sanctuary
in India, and intensive agriculture in the Netherlands. 2) What types of social institutions
may be most effective for increasing the conservation of wild and agricultural biodiversity
given increased demand on land and climate change? Interdisciplinary and multi-scale
research in the abovementioned agricultural landscapes will indicate similarities and
differences for effective strategies that potentially minimize biodiversity loss. 3) How can
modeling approaches help to support negotiation and inform decision making for greater
resilience, given the complexity of social-ecological frameworks? The panel’s experiences
with different types of models (e.g., conceptual, biophysical, statistical, geoinformation,
and participatory) will be presented, and they will explore the significance and usefulness
for different types of end-users. Ways to build scenarios that rely on the outputs of
research data and models will be examined. A brief synthesis will be presented and linked
to the objectives of the DIVERSITAS agroBIODIVERSITY network
http://www.agrobiodiversity-diversitas.org/ .